Past, present, and future of customer engagement

Abstract

Customer engagement (CE) is a marketing concept that emerged after the new millennium. Despite flourishing interest on CE among marketing academics and professionals, no review, to date, has provided a comprehensive overview of the past, present, and future trends of CE. Instead, past reviews on CE are often limited to conceptual (e.g., construct) or contextual (e.g., hospitality and tourism) insights derived using traditional review methods (e.g., descriptive) with a relatively modest review sample (e.g., tens to low hundreds), which provide a limited understanding of the field in its entirety. To address this gap, this review conducted a combination of bibliometric and thematic analyses on 861 CE articles published in 377 Scopus-indexed journals between 2006 and 2020. As a result, this review reveals the major trends in article, author, country, and journal performance, as well as the past, present, and future thematic trends of CE research, and thus, provides a one stop, state-of-the-art overview of CE that marketing scholars can rely on to position and design future CE research.